Further Reading

"Winamp.com and associated Web services will no longer be available past December 20, 2013. Additionally, Winamp Media players will no longer be available for download. Please download the latest version before that date," AOL announced.

But fans of the venerable software have launched a "Save Winamp" website and petition asking AOL either to keep Winamp alive or to open source its code.

"The history of digital music started with Winamp," says the group, which includes nine developers who have pledged to improve Winamp if the source code is released. "Our goal is to convince Nullsoft [the AOL subsidiary behind Winamp] to release the Winamp source code and we will take it further in an open-source way."

The petition was started by Web hosting company owner Peter Zawacki of Australia, and it has more than 12,000 supporters thus far. "If AOL allows it to go open source it WILL live on forever and be in the hands of people who love it and use it every day," the petition states.

We've asked AOL if the company is willing to release Winamp's source code but haven't yet received a response.

117 Reader Comments

A lot of times companies won't free their software because it uses other proprietary software that they can't legally free. However, I think this argument (which is used commonly) is flawed. Release what you can to the community and the community itself will fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be 100% working right out of the door. If people care, they'll take care of the rest themselves, that's part of the beauty of it.

A lot of times companies won't free their software because it uses other proprietary software that they can't legally free. However, I think this argument (which is used commonly) is flawed. Release what you can to the community and the community itself will fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be 100% working right out of the door. If people care, they'll take care of the rest themselves, that's part of the beauty of it.

That may be true, but it could take an army of lawyers to figure out which parts can be released and which can't. Hardly seems worth the trouble for a business.

A lot of times companies won't free their software because it uses other proprietary software that they can't legally free. However, I think this argument (which is used commonly) is flawed. Release what you can to the community and the community itself will fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be 100% working right out of the door. If people care, they'll take care of the rest themselves, that's part of the beauty of it.

There's a cost to this though. If it's a large code base where the proprietary code is intermingled, you need somebody (or groups of people) who understand the code base and who know what can be legally shared and what can't. And they have to go through everything. Source Code Comments, docs, resources. Files in the project hierarchy that are no longer in the project.

Then they need to prepare the project for release. You can do nothing, and release something that probably doesn't compile. All the way to have the proprietary code stubbed out (assuming it isn't launching the app essential) with a documented build process. Anything other than "do nothing" is more cost for a project that is being shut down. But "do nothing" probably leaves a bad reputation for the parent company for the "do nothing" approach.

Then, if you made a mistake, you have a large legal liability hanging around your neck.

Itunes is way too heavyweight (and forces updates way too often) for how little I use a local music player.. but when I DO use one, it's nice to have one that's full-featured. Winamp was one of the few to include mikmod/any way to play mod files, as well as one of the best implementations thereof. Plus support for flac and all my other odd files from over the years. And nice, configurable global hotkey support, good visualizations... I could go on.

As much as I'd like to see it released, as others point out, it definitely includes licensed MPEG patents, as well as the tie-ins to gracenote CDDB/etc.. that stuff would probably all need to be stripped out of a community release, which would suck, but winamp was designed with a pretty decent plugin architecture, you could probably replace all the proprietary stuff with GPL'd alternatives with minimal invasive code changes. But as noted, it would cost AOL money to do a legal code audit to prep for release.

Perhaps if a kickstarter was set up to 'buy' the code and pay for the process? (Of course, to do that with any real chance of success, someone at the head of the kickstarter would need a 'deal' with AOL to find out how much they'd have to kickstart for, but AOL probably wouldn't give them the time of day without the money in hand.)

I haven't used it in a while (I have a zune pass so I'm pretty much forced onto Microsoft's software, although it's not terrible. Not good either though), but when I did it was because it was lighter weight than Winamp was at the time and with a few smart additions. I'd suggest replacing Winamp with it anyway.

I listen to chiptunes, and Winamp's modular support has given me a one-stop player via the Chipamp plugin to listen to it all. Not having this support is a deal-breaker for me, and I haven't gone to any alternatives because of this. (Although lately I haven't gone looking for alternatives...)

Everyday. Lightweight, does what I need. I used to do shoutcast but stick to slacker or spotify nowadays.Allows me to broadcast easily. Connects to my iPod video, iPod shuffle and Android devices and allows transfer to and from.

Everyday. Lightweight, does what I need. I used to do shoutcast but stick to slacker or spotify nowadays.Allows me to broadcast easily. Connects to my iPod video, iPod shuffle and Android devices and allows transfer to and from.

I love how it syncs with my Android phone whenever it's in range of my wireless network.

If AOL let Winamp into the wild, they'd probably botch it up like the way Oracle hosed up Open Office with it's heavy-handed tactics.

Probably not, a release to the Apache Foundation would be excellent. The major reason why the OpenOffice transfer was huge pool of suck is because A) the OO consortium was already becoming toxic to the developer community, B) said community had already split by the time the code drop happened, C) there was a major licensing barrier that prevented easy two-way code contributions.

None of that applies to Winamp, which has been developed behind closed doors the entire time. There essentially is no developer community to fragment, no competing/incompatible licenses, no code drift between disparate forks, etc.

A lot of times companies won't free their software because it uses other proprietary software that they can't legally free. However, I think this argument (which is used commonly) is flawed. Release what you can to the community and the community itself will fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be 100% working right out of the door. If people care, they'll take care of the rest themselves, that's part of the beauty of it.

There's also a semi-strategic component. You never know when the market will shift and an opportunity opens up that could justify brining it back. From a business's perspective, there's no real value in giving away something like this (MAYBE a bit of good will, but I don't think anyone really believes the type of people that might take advantage of a Winamp open source project are likely to be AOL customers any time soon) and at least a small potential value in still having the IP all to yourself for future use.

They absolutely cannot give away an MP3 or WMA codec, whether they wrote it or bought it. I can smell the rotten breath of the patent holders from here. Or does Windows let you encode and decode MP3 using existing system libraries?

They absolutely cannot give away an MP3 or WMA codec, whether they wrote it or bought it. I can smell the rotten breath of the patent holders from here. Or does Windows let you encode and decode MP3 using existing system libraries?

There are plenty of freeware MP3 encoder/decoders out there, such as LAME.

Never understood this. On an older rig perhaps (a much older rig), but on more recent hardware it works as well as other software of it's complexity.

Itunes is a total media manager, which is cool if that's what you want. I can manage my media just fine and prefer a simple player. I use VLC, but winamp was always a nice intermediary between the two.

Never understood this. On an older rig perhaps (a much older rig), but on more recent hardware it works as well as other software of it's complexity.

You'd be surprised. When you start putting some stress on your system for various reasons (heavy duty image editing, compiling, 3D rendering, etc), something like a music player will be less likely to start failing music playback if it is more lightweight (As it won't require nearly as much resources and so your machine won't start complaining). Also, just because more recent hardware can handle the bloat better doesn't really excuse the extra drain on system resources. A lightweight program will perform much better than a bloated program, regardless of the hardware it is running on.

Back in the day when I still did big 3D rendering stuff on my machine, iTunes just couldn't play on my then rather beefy machine whilst the rendering was happening. Other, more lightweight players managed just fine.

Itunes is way too heavyweight (and forces updates way too often) for how little I use a local music player.. but when I DO use one, it's nice to have one that's full-featured. Winamp was one of the few to include mikmod/any way to play mod files, as well as one of the best implementations thereof. Plus support for flac and all my other odd files from over the years. And nice, configurable global hotkey support, good visualizations... I could go on.

I guess it's just difference in how you use it. I use iTunes as a quick rip and sync setup for my iPod, and with Synctoy (you really had to shut off Live Mesh, MS?) my library matches across all my computers seamlessly. Unless you're running one of the newer laptops/tablets with a pitifully small SSD I don't see the point in making a big deal about iTunes' size.

They absolutely cannot give away an MP3 or WMA codec, whether they wrote it or bought it. I can smell the rotten breath of the patent holders from here. Or does Windows let you encode and decode MP3 using existing system libraries?

The mp3 patents have expired everywhere but the US. Simply put up a warning prohibiting downloads if you are in the USA. Is it your problem if someone breaks your "ToS"?

A lot of times companies won't free their software because it uses other proprietary software that they can't legally free. However, I think this argument (which is used commonly) is flawed. Release what you can to the community and the community itself will fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be 100% working right out of the door. If people care, they'll take care of the rest themselves, that's part of the beauty of it.

This is EXACTLY what Volition did with the FreeSpace 2 engine. I don't think that project can in any objective way be determined to be a failure.

As for the, potential, legal hurdles of open sourcing WinAmp, I think that only some of the encoders could pose licensing issues. However, WinAmp is modular, all the the encoders and decoders are simply plug ins which can be removed and the main program open sourced.

I haven't used it in a while (I have a zune pass so I'm pretty much forced onto Microsoft's software, although it's not terrible. Not good either though), but when I did it was because it was lighter weight than Winamp was at the time and with a few smart additions. I'd suggest replacing Winamp with it anyway.

Ok, I'm curious now. To me this looks exactly like MediaMonkey and Songbird (from way back when.) Is there some permissively-licensed Winamp clone from which all these are forked?

Itunes is a total media manager, which is cool if that's what you want. I can manage my media just fine and prefer a simple player. I use VLC, but winamp was always a nice intermediary between the two.

Media Player Classic seems to be even more lightweight than VLC, albeit without most of the neat network streaming, but I still keep it as the default for opening individual sound files, whereas I maintain my actual library in MediaMonkey. I'd recommend giving it a shot.

A lot of times companies won't free their software because it uses other proprietary software that they can't legally free. However, I think this argument (which is used commonly) is flawed. Release what you can to the community and the community itself will fill in the blanks. It doesn't have to be 100% working right out of the door. If people care, they'll take care of the rest themselves, that's part of the beauty of it.

There's a cost to this though. If it's a large code base where the proprietary code is intermingled, you need somebody (or groups of people) who understand the code base and who know what can be legally shared and what can't. And they have to go through everything. Source Code Comments, docs, resources. Files in the project hierarchy that are no longer in the project.

Then they need to prepare the project for release. You can do nothing, and release something that probably doesn't compile. All the way to have the proprietary code stubbed out (assuming it isn't launching the app essential) with a documented build process. Anything other than "do nothing" is more cost for a project that is being shut down. But "do nothing" probably leaves a bad reputation for the parent company for the "do nothing" approach.

Then, if you made a mistake, you have a large legal liability hanging around your neck.

As awesome as the idea sounds, this is precisely why I think it's massively unlikely AOL would open source it. If they are shutting down the product that means they've got other plans for the personnel and resources (i.e. move them to other stuff, lay them off, etc..).

As romantic an idea as it is, releasing an exiting product as open source requires effort, they simply can't just zip up the repo and post it on their website. It requires time, and as they say; "time is money". Sanitizing the code, looking into licensing/legal issues, etc, all require people, and at the end of the day someone in the company has to charge those people's hours to some project code, and they probably don't have a project code for "this makes us no money, but would be awesome to do".

It would certainly be nice PR move now, but in 6 months everyone would have forgotten about this either way, so I seriously doubt they'll bother.

The problem with large companies is inertia, and it's unfortunately not working in favour of this idea.

I haven't used it in a while (I have a zune pass so I'm pretty much forced onto Microsoft's software, although it's not terrible. Not good either though), but when I did it was because it was lighter weight than Winamp was at the time and with a few smart additions. I'd suggest replacing Winamp with it anyway.

Love the header pic. "WinAMP (winamp. WINAMP!): It really whips the llama's ass." is one of those things I'd heard so many times that I can still hear it, pitch perfectly, in my head. Like Optimus Prime's voice from the 80's Transformers cartoon - some things just stick with you.

I never understood the fascination with llamas these guys had. Was it a call to the late 90s gaming slang, where lamers were llamas? Was it just that they had a thing for fuzzy pack animals? Why not camels, then? Or Alpacas? I don't know. I'm sure there's an explanation for it out there, somewhere, but I don't think I actually want to know. It's more fun that way.

One day, I'll be giving my grandkids a computer history lesson with some old virtual machines, and I'll install a copy of WinAMP (for playing music, you see... before we had "the cloud"). When it loads up, they'll say "grandpa, why doesn't winamp like llamas?"

And I'll just smile and say "well, after the great llama conflict of the mid 90s, a secret group of gamers, known as the Fatal1ty Four, widely believed to be the driving force behind the GPU wars of the oughts, realized that the amount of heat coming from their systems was enough that they wouldn't need wool sweaters in the winter anymore, especially with all the game time they were getting in over the winter school break.

The FF decided that gaming systems needed to be extreme, more extremer than they had ever extremed before. Like, extreme to the max. So the overlocking cold war -heh - began. They used mineral oil, they watercooled, they had fans fast enough to make a tower case float on an air cushion so they could play air hockey while their levels loaded, some even used liquid nitrogen. But the heat kept on coming, and they used that to pry loose gamer culture from the iron grip of the wool consortium.

Their campaign began in secret, but once the seed was planted it spread out into all corners of nerddom. Eventually, they decided to spread the FF's message by working with the WinAMP developers to get the word out to the less connected nerds, the ones on dial-up who used Gozilla to download MP3s one at a time, taking half an hour (ish) each as long as someone didn't pick up the phone and the connection was decent. The message was simple: overclockers and gamers of the world, unite: game all day! game all night! keep yourselves warm by making those CPUs really, really work for the wattage. And you won't need to wear a sweater while you do it!

Anyways, they eventually shortened it to "It really whips the llama's ass" because it was shorter, and easier to reference while gibbing noobs on Q3DM17."

And those kids will look at me, jaws agape, eyes wide, stunned into absolute silence. And before they can ask if I'm telling the truth, before they can cock their heads to the side to get a wikipedia infodump right to the brain (kids these days are so frikkin weird!), I'll smile and say:

"The 90s were weird like that."

Anyhow, yes, open source it please. WinAMP is internet history. Every one of us nerds that grew up gaming on PCs in the 90s knew what it was, and it should be preserved, rather than vanishing into the AOLspace.